Radar Systems Modelling (2016)

Course Information

Course Description

Download Course Handout: Radar Systems Modelling 2016

A practical course, which requires a sound knowledge of Radar Systems and Signal Processing, and teaches you how to use that knowledge to synthesise the design of a system to a requirement, but, also to be able to model alternative designs, and assess the suitability of such designs. This skill is essential when involved with the design of a sensor, or evaluating the usefulness of a sensor for specific applications.

The approach taken is in two parts: firstly, we analyse an existing system, to predict and compare performance against advertised radar performance. This is followed by the design of improvements to the system, based on practicals and project work by the student. The system considered is just one example of the broad field of radar, i.e. Air Traffic Control radar, but the systems thinking is widely applicable.

(Please note that the most recent course handout will be available via Vula.)

Course Overview

The following topics will be covered:

What is air traffic control?

The ATCR family

Blake’s analysis

Clutter

Targets

The ATCR processing chain

Moving target indicator

Antennas

Reliability

Basics of Pulse Doppler

Pulse Doppler processing

Radar front end constraints

Modelling the detection process

AREPS for propagation modelling

CARPET

Bistatic Radar

NetRAD and its database

Presenters

Prof Michael Inggs is a full Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Cape Town, South Africa, responsible for the taught masters programme in Radar.

His research interests include radar, earth observation using radar, and high performance computing architectures and languages for signal and image processing. He has more than 190 journal and conference publications, three patents, and has supervised more than 90 M.Sc. and 8 Ph.D. to completion.

Dr Yunus Abdul Gaffar is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Cape Town, and a member of the Radar Remote Sensing Group. His interest is in the general field of radar signal processing and more specifically in radar imaging, detection, tracking and clutter analysis.